mouth?" He whipped his head back
and forth in simulated agony.
He showed the visual-effects team a
new opening that he and Andrew Weis-
blum had devised, with title cards that
explained the Watchers and laid out the
"Cain people bad / Seth people good"
dynamic. For the first time, Aronofsky
had shown a rough cut of his work to a
number of other artists, and both the
director David Fincher and the writer
Michael Chabon had urged him to es-
tablish the rules of his genre-bending
world early---a move that Paramount
applauded. Musing aloud, he said, "The
problem is, it's a hundred-and-twenty-
five-million-dollar film. The way I do it
is let the audiences be detectives and
figure out what's going on. But here
we're just bluntly saying, 'These are the
good guys, these are the bad guys, this is
a fantasy film taking place in a mythical
quasi-Biblical world.' Aesthetically and
stylistically, it's not clean, but"---he bal-
anced scales---"narratively it allows peo-
ple to relax and understand what they're
going to see."
Ben Snow, from I.L.M., showed
Aronofsky the most kinetic moment in
the battle. Four months earlier, at a
meeting in New York, the director had
told I.L.M., "Samyaza's three arms in
the back are doing nothing---we need a
whole other layer of digi-double people
flying out like knee-high grass from a
lawnmower as he throws and crushes.
And I like the idea of a stunt arm that's
a point that could just be squashing
people on their heads, like a kid squash-
ing ants." Now here it was: an entirely
composited scene of a Watcher whirl-
ing and stamping and clubbing and
kicking and smiting about twenty digi-
tal humans. "That's fucking gory!"
Aronofsky said. With a measure of
chagrin, he added, "So why do I have
to go to the set anymore? Next time,
can't I just show up here and see what
you've done?"
In December, Paramount tested its
least Aronofskian version of "Noah":
an eighty-six-minute beatitude that
began with a montage of religious im-
agery, ended with a Christian rock song,
and skipped the whole middle, the dra-
matic part of the drama comprising
Tubal-Cain's bloody machinations and
Noah's turn against his family. Rob
Moore explained, "Most people do have
a sense that the Noah story is a short,
happy journey where Noah rescues
mankind and the animals. They're
not thinking, All but eight people
die." So if that cut had tested strongly,
Moore said, "who knows what would
have happened?"
Yet neither that version, nor any of
Paramount's others, scored higher than
Aronofsky's rough cut had in August.
Arnon Milchan, Paramount's funding
partner, said, "Darren was probably
afraid that the studio's version would
look like 'Pretty Woman' and test like
'Free Willy.' But the other tests con-
firmed that you can't reinvent the movie
that Darren did. Once you lose the tex-
ture of his 'Noah,' the moral complex-
ity, all you have is a sweet little Holly-
wood movie that you could make for
twenty million dollars." So Paramount
declared victory and surrendered the
field. In February, Aronofsky told me,
"The process sucked." But, he added,
with a renewed strength born of sur-
mounting an affliction, "I don't know if
you can find another over-a-hundred-
million-dollar movie that didn't have re-
shoots. And, at this point, Paramount
ninety-eight-per-cent supports every-
thing I want in the movie. So I live
and die by this version, and take full
responsibility."
The studio, stuck with a film that
had scope and brawn and intensity
(and one that, perforce, had a happy
ending), began to put its marketing
power behind it, advertising "Noah"
during the Super Bowl and the Olym-
pics. In response to the test screen-
ings---and to some unrest in the Chris-
tian community, gleefully exacerbated
by the Hollywood trade papers---it
took care to introduce Tubal-Cain in
its ads, and put a label on all its mar-
keting materials, warning that "artistic
license has been taken" and that "the
Biblical story of Noah can be found
in the Book of Genesis." The ads also
omitted the Watchers, presented Noah
as a beefy Gandalf, and gave no hint of
the film's ineradicably indie soul.
For even as Aronofsky began the film
by spoon-feeding the audience the rules
of his genre-bending world, he had
Clint Mansell unfurl a jarring, nearly
hostile D chord---repeated throughout
"And you thought it was so easy just to ignore me on the subway."